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> How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government That department of censorship will exist no matter what. Internally, it is called the t

by stale2002 5y ago

> How do you not end up with a censorship department of the government That department of censorship will exist no matter what. Internally, it is called the trust and safety department, at most big companies. The only question is do you want to have the decisions of that department to be limited by judges and rights that are laid out in the constitution, or do you want it to be an unaccountable free for all, where they can do whatever they want? > Do you have any other way to implement your idea of forcing Facebook to show you the feeds you subscribe to? Well, phone companies are currently forced to allow most people on their network. We could do it the same way, that phone companies are required to do so.

teeray 5y ago
> The only question is do you want… or do you want… Therein the problem lies. Users have no choice over which moderation policies their feeds are curated by at all. I should be able to choose moderation that I deem acceptable. To continue your analogy to telcos, this is akin to robocall blocking services which are a user decision and often tell you when blocking occurs.
clucas 5y ago
> rights that are laid out in the constitution Just to be clear, under US law, what you are describing (creating a government censorship department that determines how social media companies are allowed to moderate) would have NOTHING to do with the rights laid out in the constitution - it would in fact need to overcome the companies' constitutional rights to publish whatever they wish, just to exist. You can argue that it's a good idea anyway, but claiming that government-mandated moderation is somehow enforcing constitutional rights is way, way off base.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > Just to be clear, under US law, what you are describing (creating a government censorship department that determines how social media companies are allowed to moderate Yes it could. The point is that if the government is doing the "censorsing" or whatever you want to call it, then at the very least, whatever that "censoring" is, we have judges and rights and similar checks and balances that prevents the government from doing too much. If something is so bad, that it needs to be censored, then our court system should handle it.

teeray 5y ago

> The only question is do you want… or do you want… Therein the problem lies. Users have no choice over which moderation policies their feeds are curated by at all. I should be able to choose moderation that I deem acceptable. To continue your analogy to telcos, this is akin to robocall blocking services which are a user decision and often tell you when blocking occurs.

clucas 5y ago

> rights that are laid out in the constitution Just to be clear, under US law, what you are describing (creating a government censorship department that determines how social media companies are allowed to moderate) would have NOTHING to do with the rights laid out in the constitution - it would in fact need to overcome the companies' constitutional rights to publish whatever they wish, just to exist. You can argue that it's a good idea anyway, but claiming that government-mandated moderation is somehow enforcing constitutional rights is way, way off base.

stale2002 5y ago
> Just to be clear, under US law, what you are describing (creating a government censorship department that determines how social media companies are allowed to moderate Yes it could. The point is that if the government is doing the "censorsing" or whatever you want to call it, then at the very least, whatever that "censoring" is, we have judges and rights and similar checks and balances that prevents the government from doing too much. If something is so bad, that it needs to be censored, then our court system should handle it.